Farah Ghafoor : How does a poem begin?

How does a poem begin?

 

 

 

Beginnings are the most important part of a poem because without a strong beginning, you’ll lose the reader. Many poems have lost me due to weak word choice and lack of tension, so I’m always paying attention to beginnings. The technical aspect comes later, however, because poems first begin in the heart and mind. In my own work, they begin with a question, or a phrase, or an observation. Occasionally an idiom I find funny or interesting. I tend to write two types of poems: poems of intent, and personal, meditative poems.

The first category might spark from research (read: fervent googling about why the world is the way it is) or by stumbling upon a fact (earthworms having five hearts – how devastating). I love learning via podcasts about history, climate, and economics. These subjects are so interlinked that I think they are the perfect breeding ground for poems, which serve to link ideas and thoughts. The linkages ferment in the back of my mind often until I have strong analogies or additional ties to my daily life. This has been a very fun analytical practice.

The second type of poem arises from freewriting, which I do as often as possible. I’ve heard that separating journaling from freewriting will make your work more focused, but I like to keep all of my thoughts, experiences, observations, and research in one place. Instead of morning pages, I practice night pages, writing when I’m tired and thus more imaginative. How do I understand this moment, this day, this month, this year? Through simile and metaphor. I once thought I could write myself toward any solution, which turned out to be untrue, of course, but I have plenty of material now, don’t I?

The most enjoyable poems begin, I believe, in other poems. Nothing beats reading a few poems by a brilliant poet and feeling the overwhelming desire to write. I love when poets use uncommon, but musical words in a poem, or words that are so precise that I have to look them up. I keep my phone near me when I read to do so. I love how poems become experiences this way, so they begin again and again in the hearts and homes of readers.

 

 

 

Farah Ghafoor is the author of Shadow Price (House of Anansi, 2025). Selections of her debut won the E.J. Pratt Medal and Prize in Poetry, and were finalists for the CBC Poetry Prize and the Far Horizons Award. Her work appears in art exhibitions, magazines, anthologies, and post-secondary course curriculums. Farah resides in Tkaranto (Toronto) where she writes about the intersection of climate change, colonialism, and capitalism.

 

Jérôme Melançon : Je regarde de la porno quand je suis triste, by Sayaka Araniva-Yanez

Je regarde de la porno quand je suis triste, SayakaAraniva-Yanez
Triptyque, 2024

 

 

 

Quite simply, it’s fun to open a book titled I look at porn when I’m sad to a reproduction of an early 16th century painting of Mary, holding Baby Jesus with one arm, alleviating suffering in purgatory by extracting her milk with the other. It’s especially fun when the book in question offers poems the author has written around phrases produced by a chatbot who had been “trained” on poetry, in a historical moment during which we are promised the alleviating of our suffering by all forms of algorithms.

The beauty of this book is that it is about this false promise and moves through it, toward fleshful encounters. The bot appears in the book as “La machine,” always in conversation with “Vous.” Its language-like productions are short and carefully chosen; they highlight the uncanny dreaminess of the process and the wonders of our own capacity for speech and creativity in “our” responses. In other words, Araniva-Yanez did not rely on any kind of statistical linguistic algorithm to write their poems. Indeed, the machine’s productions are the result of their selections of poetry, and some of the words attributed to it are in fact simply invented by them. Araniva-Yanez thus turns the logic of LLMs on its head, attributing to a chatbot the hallucinations they imagined as part of their writing. The book is full of short poems in verse and a few prose poems that interrogate our relationship to machines, but also our body, language, and above all desire. Sexual pleasure and attraction to other people, to be more specific – and notably as they are mediated and oriented by machines, through pornography and forms of direct communication.

One element that surely contributes to the success of these poems is their rejection of religion. Araniva-Yanez removes both the poet/programmer and the chatbot from the position of the divine which they tend to take in contemporary culture, all the while bringing the divine within the reach of both human and machine. God is sometimes an automaton, lifeless in comparison to everything we can feel, fed content like machines are. In other moments the speaker reaches the divine in pleasure. And the speaker addresses us readers as “Vous,” as if they were able to speak our thoughts, balancing between omniscience and input, making us a reading machine, stepping aside to let us in the poems: the speaker takes themself out of the primary position in these exchanges without allowing anyone to fully occupy it.

These wonderfully executed displacements can serve the aspirations and desires of the speaker’s self because they relativize their position and find ways to interact that avoid the naked vulnerability of the face-to-face encounter. Instead, we are placed before the vulnerability of a turned back, of the pause between words during which emotions are larger than any human action: “i turn my back / and dream of being // shame is / more fertile than us” (“je tourne le dos / et rêve d’être // la honte est / plus fertile que nous,” 43).

Such displacements help the reader focus on the relationship to the machine as instrument and as mediation, back to oneself:

“the machine believes what we tell it

it inhabits secrecy,
the spraining, and the storming 

i tamper with its giftedness when my head at large goes astray”

“la machine croit ce qu’on lui dit 

elle habite le secret,
la fêlure et l’orage 

je trafique sa douance quand ma tête s’égare au large” (50)

Here Araniva-Yanez does more than describe their poetic intermingling with the machine: they place us before the operations we impose on machines even as we delude ourselves that they may have any agency, that they may in any way respond to us. And they make us feel our bodily connections to computers, at the same time as our awareness of their inhumanity: “it has never had the gift of seeing me reborn. the proof is in what flows from its leg to mine: wires, pearly, humid, and shimmering” (“elle n’a jamais possédé le don de me voir renaître. la preuve est dans ce qui ruisselle de sa jambe à la mienne: des fils nacrés, humides et brillants,” 54). We touch (or used to touch) mouse and keyboard wires with our legs, we place(d) our leg beside the humming box, in a kind of intimacy that makes us want to see a simulacrum of flesh in the machine. Yet it remains cold or warm, devoid of any capacity beyond our instructions. Much of the poems develop this chiasm between flesh and desired flesh, using bodily functions ascribed to the machine as descriptions of its effect on the speaker, rather than as metaphors.

As the collection advances, the speaker becomes closer with the machine – though perhaps mostly with themself, through the machine. Yet although their thoughts seem to move from one into the other, the speaker retains their melancholy and their sexual desire, the latter becoming more pressing in its search for an outside object, intensifying their relationship to the machine:

“the machine holds me in its jugular, it loves me. within, i often cascade down between the roots, the sap, and the lichen. at snack time, i take pleasure in eating my knuckles and the fruit that are handed to me. in the evening, i lick its organs and the machine metamorphoses into a house of skin.”

“la machine me prend dans sa jugulaire, elle m’aime. à l’intérieur, je dévale souvent entre les racines, la sève et le lichen. au goûter, je me plais à manger mes jointures et les fruits qu’on me tend. le soir, je lèche ses organes et la machine se métamorphose en maison de peau.” (79)

The collection crashes through its title to give us a sharp description of the desires we harbour for machines – desires for what they could be to us, for what they could do to us; desires we already have for the other people who are absent from these poems. Araniva-Yanez helps us work through desire, the proximity of hope and lust, of sexual excitement and intellectual curiosity, of the purest language and the touching of organic matter. And perhaps my continued reliance on the register of helping and guiding (much of which I’ve now rephrased) is one way for me to acknowledge just to what degree this collection has helped me think about the reality of our emotional investment in machines, and more broadly in what we create and animate, and thus make real.

 

 

 

 

Jérôme Melançon does not like large language models or any technology labeled “artificial intelligence”, and feels this dislike ought to be shared seeing as it so clearly gave direction to this review. He does love poetry. He writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. His fourth collection, Prairial·es, will be out in October 2025 with Prise de parole. Let us not forget his three chapbooks with above/ground press: Bridges Under the Water (2023), Tomorrow’s Going to Be Bright (2022), and Coup (2020), his occasional translations, and his book of philosophy, La politique dans l’adversité (Metispresses, 2018). He has also edited books and journal issues, and keeps publishing academic articles that sometimes have to do with some of this. He is on various social media under variations of @lethejerome, notably at bsky.social.

arien wolf : two poems

 

 

 

list of things that resemble the shape of my mother’s body

a broken atomic clock, a bin of turquoise marbles, hair sweepings, a weakening

memory, blue dish soap pooled to a dent in tarnished stainless steel, a kettle of

just boiling water, an empty hand, a robin’s egg, an ever-filling clean plate, a book of

matches, vitreous plastic, a glowing magpie, a stone smoothed out by immemorable

time, a fresh set of dull knives, a cake made to look like anything a cake is

not supposed to be, a dreamcatcher with the price tag still on it, a postcard from

somewhere familiar but unknown, a fly making its home out in the open, a war without

a subject, a name without any index to description, a center without a place

 

 

 

sewing machines

give me a hammer a needle a bobbin to
make something stable a skirt for my sonnet
a dress for my burial a shoe for my offing
please let me have flowers have bows for my
coffin they’ll read when it’s after the tears
and the laughter they’ll mark my clichés up
with words i’ll get last of sewn into my
mattress like paper sopranos slept on by an
actress her jaw barely passes for full blood
italian a muff or a stallion historic parameter
outlines a race through the grapevines wait i
heard this new thing about sewing machines
& now i feel unclean if you know what i mean

 

 

 

 

 

arien wolf lives and writes in southern—california, studying poetry at uc irvine, where their work often concerns processes of identification and the many aporias that come with its representation.

 

Laynie Browne : on Daily Self-Portrait Valentine

 

 

 

 

My Daily Self-Portrait Valentine project began when I saw a show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, in early February of 2024, by the artist Melissa Shook, who during the 1970's did a project where she took a photograph of herself every day for a year. Many of these were nudes, all black and white, mostly shot in her New York City apartment against a blank wall, sometimes with a plant, and sometimes including her young daughter.

I found the work incredibly moving, and on the spot decided that I'd create a self-portrait every day for a year, and that I would begin on valentine's day, 2024 and finish on valentines day, 2025. My intention was a commitment to myself—to a durational project that was a love letter to the essential invisible inner being, and the hope to approach, draw near, make and stay in contact—with those ineffable aspects of "Self."

I also wondered why it was that I did not only dislike the idea of creating a self-portrait, but felt a strong aversion to the project, even revulsion or disgust. The concept, to me, was shameful. But what exactly was shameful? An image of a woman, myself, or the idea of confronting one's reflection in a series of writings, drawings, collages, paintings and photographs? I wondered why I could not think of many examples of female poets who created self-portraits in writing.  I wondered what I might learn through this process.  I thought about the classic Buddhist meditation technique of mirror gazing. I remembered one teacher telling me that women she'd worked with who were victims of abuse had violent reactions when she gave them mirrors for this practice. The women flung them to the floor in anger and frustration. They did not want to see themselves.

What was it exactly I had been avoiding? The imperative to find out was suddenly urgent. My resistance to the act of self-portraiture was my catalyst and prompt. What was underneath this nearly paralyzing dread? I vowed to investigate through daily practice. Every day for one year I created self-portraits in writing and in visual mediums. All of the writing, collage, drawing and painting was made in notebooks in the early morning. Mostly, I was attempting to contact that essence of "Self" which is beyond the physical, beyond thought, the changeless unnamable aspects of being. This timeless spiritual question—"who am I"—is one which I am endlessly attracted to—the exact opposite of the idea of "what do I look like."

The act is to finally look at what I've been avoiding, possibly avoiding for all of my life. To approach the question: why the idea of rendering oneself in one's art appeared to me abhorrent. And then, to turn that into its opposite. An attempt at self-acceptance, self-love. To say the word valentine softens the premise. To reflect on what's actually there, is a "pre" "face" to what is not visible in the physical form but defines us nonetheless—the face we present before having a face. Not what has happened to me, not how many years I've revolved around the sun, but what do I make of this self, here, and now.

Later when I read more about Melissa Shook, and a statement she wrote about her daily self-portraits I was struck by what she wrote about her mother:

"Having forgotten my mother, what she looked like, what she was like, how she treated me before she died when I was twelve, has been an abiding concern. Not remembering meant, to some extent, having to create a self without the foundation of remembering much about those first twelve years and trying to raise a daughter without remembering having been a child."

Also much later, I realized that of course I'd been inspired by Bernadette Mayer's important work Memory. Mayer's work Memory is not "self-portraits," yet the durational nature of the work, the vast quantity of photographs and writing, and the audio recording played in a gallery where the photographs were displayed—are all important influences, as is her entire oeuvre.

In my own self-portraits, I quickly learned that though I'd always hated being photographed, that when I photographed myself, that impediment was removed. It was only me behind the camera, so what did I have to fear?  For the first time, I relaxed. Wanting to share this experience, I began to photograph friends, always beginning with a conversation in which I asked these friends, primarily female poets, what was the photograph they'd always wanted of themselves. I wanted to know how these women wanted to be seen—and to create the photographs for them based on their visions. This collaborative process is one I am continuing beyond the year-long durational project.

Currently Daily Self-Portrait Valentine exists as more than four hundred pages of writing, thousands of photographs, and hundreds of drawings and collages. My hope is to create an audio recording of the writing to be played in various settings where selections of the artwork will be displayed, as well as print versions of this work.

 

 

 

 

Laynie Browne’s recent books of poetry include: Apprentice to a Breathing Hand (Omnidawn, 2025), Everyone & Her Resemblances (Pamenar, 2024), Intaglio Daughters (Ornithopter 2023), and Translation of the Lilies Back into Lists (Wave Books, 2022). She co-edited the anthology I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women (Les Figues Press) and edited the anthology A Forest on Many Stems: Essays on The Poet’s Novel (Nightboat). Honors include a Pew Fellowship, the National Poetry Series Award for her collection The Scented Fox, and the Contemporary Poetry Series Award for her collection Drawing of a Swan Before Memory. She teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.